Arts & Culture

IF YOU WROTE down your past year’s most significant personal joys and losses on a timeline, how might they line up with the liturgical calendar — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, and Ordinary Time? Placing these two calendars side by side, what might you find? Stephanie Duncan Smith digs into these questions in her memoir Even After Everything. For Duncan Smith — and likely for most of us — “Sometimes our personal moments converge with these natural and sacred seasons in profound, meaning-rich ways. And sometimes they clash with unbearable disparity.”

Duncan Smith shares her own story of loss and love with unflinching honesty, even and especially where it seems to clash with the Christian story. The places of dissonance are, for her, both a “dizzying problem” and a “place of divine encounter.” She invites us to dive into the dissonance with her as she wrestles out a sort of reconciliation — a renewed understanding of the Christian story that makes room, so much room, for every human grief. “The promise has never been smooth nor safe passage,” Duncan Smith writes. “The divine promise is presence.”

STUDY AFTER STUDY and book after book tells you that modern society has a community-support problem. People are lonelier and more isolated than ever and are expected to solve these collective and societal problems by themselves. But you don’t have to do this alone. You can do this with the support of my handy guide to community building!

Allow me to propose some ideas for how to create your own community-support network when every thread in the fabric of American society seems designed to keep you from it.

□ Search relevant terms on Google such as: “What is community?” and “What is community support?” Start a discussion group to answer these questions. Congratulations! You now have a community of people who love to argue in circles. Consider turning this into a Bible study.

Since his critically acclaimed album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar has been wrestling with the devil. But on GNX, his surprise album released last Friday, Lamar stops wrestling and writes a reconciliation between Satan and God.

The season is stuffed (pun fully intended) with stress, loved ones, and remembering to share our blessings with others. These films remind me of those feelings.

AROUND MY NECK hangs a cross made of polished pear wood and brushed steel. Growing up, I was taught that it was a timeless, universal reminder of Christian faith. But as Nijay K. Gupta reveals in a new book, Strange Religion, it can also be seen as a tangible reminder of another truth: The earliest Christians were weird.

As Gupta writes, “Weird is not always bad ... weird can be good. But weird can also be dangerous.” This danger was precisely why the earliest Christians were regarded with suspicion, even fear, by the Romans. “Christians had no temples, no priests, and no cult statues,” Gupta writes. “They had no sacred legends or texts of their own in the first century. ... They went out and intentionally tried to spread their religious practices far and wide.” Because the power of the Roman Empire depended on the strength of its civic religion and practices, “this naturally brought [early Christians] under suspicion” by the authorities. A threat to the religious status quo was seen as directly undermining the stability of the state.

Gupta focuses his latest book on the decades after the crucifixion when the church was becoming established.

THERE IS SOMETHING horrendous about the politics of being 13 — the raging hormones, the prepubescent brinkmanship; nobody knows what they’re doing, and everyone wants you to think that they do. Such is the case for Chris Wang (played by Izaac Wang), aka Wang Wang, aka Dìdi, aka Half-Asian Chris (he’s not actually half-Asian). Chris is having a bit of an identity crisis.

Director Sean Wang’s Dìdi is a love letter to adolescence rendered with painstaking specificity, a period piece set in his own childhood home of Fremont, Calif., during the era of T9 texting and AOL instant messenger.

It’s the summer before freshman year in 2008 and Chris is getting into shenanigans: skating with his friends, wondering if he should send a :) or a ;) to his crush, and generally feeling emotions nobody else could possibly understand. Plus, his mother keeps arguing with his grandmother and asking if he’s feeling sad — so annoying. And his sister, who sucks, obviously, is leaving for college, but at least she has good taste in music (or rather, she likes the same music as Chris’ crush).

There is such frenetic volatility to early adolescence.

In the first few moments of Exhibiting Forgiveness, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) is beaten after he defends a store clerk in a convenience store robbery. The violence, like most of the violence in the film, is just out of view. Soon the scene shifts and Tarrell (André Holland) wakes from a nightmare. His wife Aisha (Andra Day) reassures Tarrell that he is safe in the beautiful world they are building for themselves as artists and parents.